What a first feature this is! I had a slack-jawed grin for almost the entire duration of Buñuel’s hilarious and absurd inaugural slap in the face of religion and the upper class (inaugural ‘feature-length’ slap, at least). While much of the symbolism in the film would hardly be extreme in recent contexts constructed by Antichrists and Holy Mountains, the structural graininess of pre-WWII celluloid intuitively evokes a slightly conservative viewing palette (Guy Maddin’s sense of humor capitalizes on this), and makes the radical nature of the film still potent today. Always ready for a good Jesus bashing, this film satisfies so many of my cynical urges: throwing clergyman out of second-floor windows, slapping careless women, and shooting bratty children dead in their steps. Luis Buñuel’s captial ‘S’ Surrealism is triumphantly and intelligently absurd, while faker ‘surreal’ filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry come across as insignificantly quirky in comparison.
Offering up an interpretation of the film’s narrative and symbols not only seems unmanageable for anyone without a sturdy background in the founding ideologies of Surrealism, but unnecessary. More than Buñuel and Dalí’s prior, and similar, Un Chien Andalou, this film’s subtext is more viscerally accessible. The prologue explaining the behavioral nature of scorpions is just as much of a non sequitor as the cow in the bed or the burning kitchen, but they are intuitively linked to the goings-on in the film in ways that makes the film richer rather than obtuse, such as the cutting of the eye at the beginning of Andalou, which I cannot find purpose in other than as a memorable shock tactic (not to say that it is empty and meaningless, but that it is detached from the narrative thread, and can only be integrated through an academic interpretation).